The Sun Does Shine: A triumph of faith, love and the human spirit

Singer Wills Morgan gave a powerful performance - throughout the entire two-hour show in the role of Anthony Ray Hinton. ICN screenshot

The oratorio The Sun Does Shine performed at the Hackney Empire on the eve of Holy Week summoned up life-affirming Easter messages of hope and resurrection.

Creator-composer Harvey Brough and librettist Justin Butcher write in the programme's foreword:

'Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested in 1985 for a murder he didn't commit and spent the next thirty years on Alabama's Death Row. Through the long years of this living hell, confined in a tiny cell just yards from the death chamber, he never gave up trying to prove his innocence. And the Alabama penal justice system, racist, rotten, and murderous to its core, never ceased in its relentless efforts to execute Anthony Ray, discouting vital evidence, delaying and obstructing every appeal, overruling legitimate concerns, hell-bent on taking his life.

His memoir, The Sun Does Shine: how I found life and freedom on Death Row, is an astonishing, heart-breaking awe-inspiring testimony to the humble and heroic courage, perseverance, dignity, grace and compassion of this remarkable man. His gutsy, earthy, searing prose grabs the reader by heart and hand and leads you every step of the way to hell and back.'

Brough, a hugely accomplished and many-faceted musician and conductor, brought forth a truly memorable evening.

Performed with gusto by Vox Holloway and the Hackney Empire Community Choir and an excellent baker's dozen of professional soloists and musicians - including Will Morgan as Hinton and Christina Gill as his mother - the oratorio is steeped in African-American language and style: Pentecostal hymns, Blues, Gospel.

Butcher, the founder of Vox Holloway, and an excellent playwright and performer to boot, has created an assured, sensitive libretto which honours admirably Hinton's memoir and vernacular.

Violence and injustice stalk the young Hinton from childhood. Wary of racists driving along the highway, he and loyal friend Lester would 'dive in the ditch an' hide … The roads warn't safe fer two black kids walkin' home alone.' The boys are literally humbled and humiliated: 'Alabama's soil was full o' the sweat an' tears an' blood an fear o' kids like us, forced to the ground fo' the colour o' their skin.'

Life chances are narrowed. Hinton toils away in a mine, his nose all but sliced off by a falling rock in 'that dark pit, full of dust an' death!' All the while he dreams of freedom and adventure in the 'big, wide world, … all the way to the ocean.' He loves women. He loves his mother who provides his moral compass. He steals a car, owns up, and in just a couple of months he'll be 'off parole'.

And then, despite alibis and not the slightest shred of evidence, he is arrested for the murder of two men and the attempted murder of a third because 'you black, boy'. As a grotesque farce of a trial proceeds, Hinton and choir concur that this is 'a good ol'-fashioned lynchin', southern-style.'

He prays for the victims and their families and all those caught up in the judicial corruption: 'Forgive them, fo' they know not what they do.'

The audience is truly caught up with Hinton's Passion. We find ourselves alongside him on Alabama's Death Row. A voice intones the traditional folk lament 'O Death' in darkness. A foot begins to tap, then another, then another, until a great chorus of stamping feet almost engulfs the song. Hands slap against the bars of the cells. Men beat on the bars with their shoes. Voices start to roar. 'Murderers! Murderers! Wayne Ritter!'

'At the climax of this cacophony, we hear the clunk and hum of a generator coughing into life, and the tearing … frazzle of the electric chair. Lights flicker on and off as the crackling staccato tattoo beats and pulses agonizingly, and then silence.'

The Chorus sings: 'The retch of fryin' flesh

burn yo' nose an' sting yo' throat,

stab yo' eyes an' heave yo' guts.'

Hinton tells us, 'The Row was haunted by the men who died in th'electric chair, the chair they called Yellow Mama, waitin' down the corridor … an' haunted by the men who chose to kill themselves instead. … Everybody cried at night - an' sometimes there was laughter, maniacal laughter, like a messenger from hell.'

Hinton and Butcher replicate the depraved and dehumanizing horror of the death penalty and associated regime that we find in Brendan Behan's Quare Fellow and Kieslowski's Thou Shalt Not Kill.

'Every night at 3am, the guards came screamin', "Breakfast, Breakfast!" Powdered eggs an' stale biscuit hard enough to bounce … Lunch at ten was a formless sludge of some kind o' meat, God knows.'

On Holman Prison's Death Row, 'Love and hope went to die.' Hinton finds himself in Hell, in an extended Dark Night of the Soul. It is in this bleakest scenario of utter heartbreak that Hinton's heart breaks open when he learns from another groaning prisoner: 'I jes' got word … my mama died.' Hinton asks the man to tell him about her. The family were 'real poor, she couldn' afford to buy no fancy clothes', but 'full o' love' she made a prom dress for his sister 'from a tablecloth and two silk pillowcases. She always found a way, man.'

In his compassion and love for his fellow inmates, in his empathy for their common humanity, Hinton finds his resurrection and redemption. In the first page of his memoir, and the first scene of the oratorio (situated in medias res) he says: 'Tragedy … pain … injustice happen - they happen to us all. It's what you choose to do wit' them - that's what matters most.'

He tells us, 'A lot o' the guys was slow in the head from birth, or mentally ill. … Monsters - that's what the worl' said - but I didn' know any monsters. I knew guys named Larry, an' Henry, Victor, Vernon, Willie an' Jimmy - guys born broken, or broken by life, abused an' warped by cruelty an' violence long befo' they ever stood in front o' judge an' jury. These were my friends, an' the Row was my home.'

He even befriends Henry Hays, the son of the head of the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama, who had lynched a young black kid with his cohort. Hays considers Hinton his best friend and repents of his hateful former life.

Compassion apart, Hinton finds other ways to cope with his grim environment. His innate love of life is matched by lively flights of the imagination, as sung out in the joyful Gospel number 'Now let me fly' when he experiences a luxurious encounter with a most sympathetic Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace. His lively intellect sees him seize the paltry hour a week allowed him to visit Holman's legal libr'y: 'You know the South don't like it when we educate ourselves. The good ol' South still hate the fact we ever learned to read.'

This yen for the literary sees Hinton persuade the warden - 'yo' typical Southern redneck' - to allow him to form a book club. 'I knew how to leave the Row any time I choose, an' I was gonna show these guys how they could leave it too.' Butcher synthesises crucial moments of education and imagination and empathy which flower in the Book Club. 'You think the folks are a certain way but then you see how - how they got to be that way, you kind of forgive them what they done.' Hinton declares to his fellow members, 'We all God's children, all of us, an' when I git out o' here, I'm gonna tell the worl' how there was men in here that mattered. Hell, maybe I'll even write a book!' The scene ends with a brutal coda: 'Around midnight, March twentieth, nineteen ninety two, Charlie Jones the Warden flipped the switch an' sent two thousand volts through Larry Heath till he was dead. The next time Book Club met, we left an empty chair fo' founder member Larry Heath.'

Hinton states, 'I'd rather die fo' the truth than live a lie.' He speaks truth to a corrupt power. Butcher's libretto honours the theatre tradition of the theatre of witness famously exemplified in the 1970s play The Island by Winston Nshona, John Kani and Athol Fugard which recounted the playing of Antigone in Robben Island's notorious prison, South Africa. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there at the time.

For 30 years Hinton fights to clear his name, 'bouncin' from court to court like a ball in a pinball machine'. His case is taken up by the celebrated campaigning lawyer Bryan Stevenson of the Equal Justice Initiative.

'Some people count sheep to fall asleep at night; I count the dead,' Hinton tells us.

'Andrew Lackey was only on Death Row about five years;

he was slow in the head, chose not to appeal,

so they killed him quicker than most.

He didn' understand what he was doin' on the Row.

The night befo' he died I spoke the names of all my friends -

all fifty-three I'd known an' seen 'em take their final walk,

all those fo' whom I'd banged on the bars fo' twenty-seven years -

that night, I whispered all their names, in darkness, through my tears.'

Hinton chants all the names in a litany, the chorus providing the refrain:

'Requiem aeternum, dona eis requiem.'

He continues:

'I wept fo' them, like they was my brothers an' sisters, even my sons,

An' I wept fo' the kids I never had, an' maybe grandkids too,

an' all the baseball games I missed, an' all the walks in the woods,

an' all the sunsets an' sunrises, livin' so long in the dark.

I remembered how good it felt to hold a woman in my arms.

Would I ever kiss a woman again? Even if I got out?

What woman would ever want to kiss the old man from Death Row?'

On April Fool's Day 2015, Hinton learned that - following a unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court - the State of Alabama had, 'without a word to anyone', dropped every charge.

Thinking of the guys on the Row, 'I closed my eyes an' lifted my face to the Alabama sky. I said a prayer fo' my Mama, gave thanks to God, an' opened my eyes. So much darkness fo' so many years in a place where the sun refused to shine. I nodded an' smiled at all the crowd, an' lifted my palms to the sun. "The sun does shine," I said. An' then the tears began to fall.'

The oratorio ends fittingly with a song 'The sun does shine', the title of course of Hinton's memoir and simultaneously a triumphant paean of praise to the sun, to the vital force, to faith and love:

'I seen his light in friends of mine,

I felt his touch in a love divine.'

The performance of Hinton's crucial memoir of witness affected the Hackney Empire audience profoundly.

As for the choir members, they went on a profound educational journey themselves and in partnership with others.

Tricia Zipfel, Chair of Vox Holloway, writes in the programme how the choir deepened its understanding of 'the traumatic legacy of slavery, post-civil rights policies of mass-incarceration, and police brutality that led to the Black Lives Matter movement.'

Partnering with the Prison Reform Trust in the UK, the choir also learned of the pressing need for reform of the British penal system. During the pandemic, choir members wrote to long-term prisoners and made friends. 'We began to understand more about this most excluded section of society and to question our own assumptions and stereotypes,' Tricia notes.

Working with the Equal Justice Initiative in the USA and the Irene Taylor Trust in the UK, the choir developed a radio programme Between the Bars featuring Hinton himself which is taking the story and the oratorio into UK prisons. Vox Holloway sang to appreciative prisoners at HMP Coldingley, one of whom wrote, 'Thank you for filling our barren halls with life-affirming, life-giving sounds, making the sun shine even where there are no windows.'

Editor's note: This was an absolutely superb premier. Harvey Brough's music is beautiful and he's done an incredible job with Vox Holloway - bringing together two choirs, eight soloists and five musicians in this compelling new work. I'm sure this was just the start - and this show is going to go much further.

LINKS

Equal Justice Initiative (EJI)

Founder by Hinton's lawyer Bryan Stevenson, EJI is a human rights organization founded in Alabama. EJI has won major legal challenges eliminating excessive and unfair sentencing, exonerating innocent death row prisoners, confronting abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aiding children prosecuted as adults. 'For every nine people who have been executed in this country, we have now identified one innocent person', claims Bryan Stevenson.

See: www.eji.org

The Irene Taylor Trust (ITT)

Since 1995, the ITT has delivered creative music projects in prisons, with former prisoners, and with young people experiencing challenging circumstances in the community.

'Incredible … This interaction with such talented people allows them to experience a sense of release, normality and frequently sparks off an element of positivity which they've not experienced in life.' Feedback from a Prison Governor

See: https://irenetaylortrust.com

For more information on Vox Holloway and videos of the show visit: https://voxholloway.com/the-sun-does-shine-march-2024/